Reading Through Roth: Introduction

Philip Roth is a name I first encountered peripherally, almost spectrally, when wondering through my libraries adult fiction section in my adolescence. The precise moment I stopped and looked and thought “These are books by a man named Philip Roth” I can not tell you in just the same way I can not tell you with any accuracy when was the first moment I stopped and thought, “I am a person, separate from others, and my name is…”. His is a name that grew inside me, slowly over my whole life. His is not a name, like perhaps Hawthorn or Hemingway or Dostoyevski or Dickens, that I learned in school to recognize as being synonymous with literary gravity. I also did not encounter him on my parents bookshelf, mostly filled with books on religion or conservative politics with the occasional Grisham or Clancy novel thrown in. Little did I know even at the time I first began to recognize his name on the spine of his books what he would become to me.

Perhaps because I have had a track record of keeping myself at a distance from things I find mysterious as a means of sustaining the mystery it was not until after college that I finally checked his American Pastoral out of the library. The ambiguous layering of the narrative frame which gave the story a certain element of dreamscape fantasy I found most compelling. However if you read it yourself you will find that never is the suspension of disbelief taken advantage of. No characters have special powers, there are no magical realms or mysterious forces referred to, most of the action takes place in New Jersey in the 1960’s and yet never are you sure if what is going on is a part of the actual narrative or simply the unfolding of the imagination of the narrator. The ultimate tragedy of the story is so believable that it’s plausibility heightens it’s emotional impact, yet even within the context of the book itself you know in the end that what has happened is mostly concocted by the narrator and is too hyperbolic to be real. At times it almost seems as if it were more a commentary on the nature of reality and fiction than a straightforward novel. I soon realized that this is quite simply Philip Roth. Reality within fiction, fiction with in reality. That is Roth.

The confused sense of what during the course of the narrative constituted reality and what was imagined fiction appealed to me on a very existential level at the time I read American Pastoral at the age of twenty-one. I myself was in one of the most confusing times of my life. Recently graduated college with a philosophy degree, hopelessly and ambivalently applying to graduate school, trying desperately to convince myself I was in love with my girlfriend at the time, working a crummy job at a local grocery store. Roth offered something more that the usual escape one finds in a good novel. He in a sense helped me to fully throw back the curtain that all of my training in philosophy had only gotten me to peak behind. He showed me things about reality that could only be encountered in fiction, a paradox that had never even occurred to me before reading him. Not only did I see the world differently after my first encounter with Roth, he represents one of the few distinct paradigm shifts in my entire worldview. Over the next several years I plunged through many of the books from his long and varied career. I read his classic Portnoy’s Complaint, I read the bulk of his early Nathan Zuckerman novels, all three of the “American Trilogy” novels (American Pastoral, I Married A Communist, and The Human Stain), his historical novel The Plot Against America, my personal favorite novel of all time Operation Shylock. On and on, with many more yet to read.

In the wake of his passing this past May, I am going to be slowly and deeply going through his work chronologically and blogging my thoughts along the way, hopefully illuminating for anyone who bothers to read this blog as well was myself just what it is about his work that so drastically altered my understanding of quite nearly everything. This will be an open ended project, one that will become what it is to become. There will of course be plot spoiling (I certainly encourage you to read along with me if you haven’t read his work already) but I intend this blog to be more of a personal hermeneutic exercise on his writing than a study guide or plot summary. The next several posts will center around his inaugural 1959 novella Goodbye, Colombus and the five short stories included with it.